“Can there be a history of a slave?” When Isaak Markus Jost asked this question, in the introduction to his “General History of the Israelite People,” published in 1832, it was by no means clear that Jewish history was a viable scholarly discipline. To many people, Jost knew, it might seem that the important part of the Jewish story had ended with the Bible, leaving only a long sequel of passive suffering. “It is commonly held that where independent activity has ceased, there too history has ceased,” he noted. And where was the independent activity in Jewish history? Ever since Judea was crushed by the Roman Empire, the Jews had possessed none of the things that made for the usual history of a nation: territory, sovereignty, power, armies, kings. Instead, the noteworthy events in Jewish history were expulsions, such as the ones that drove the Jews out of England, in 1290, and Spain, in 1492, or massacres, such as the ones that cost thousands of Jewish lives in the Rhineland during the Crusades and in Ukraine in the seventeenth century.

To a generation of German scholars engaged in inventing what they called Wissenschaft des Judentums, “the science of Judaism,” it was crucial to overcome this despairing view. Above all, it was necessary to rebut the greatest historical thinker of the age, Hegel, who had elevated the writing of history into a branch of philosophy. Hegel saw the entirety of world history—or, at least, of European history, which for him was what counted—as a progressive revelation of the spirit. Each civilization had its contribution to make to the formation of humanity; when it had done so, it inevitably crumbled, making way for the next stage.

This scheme had trouble explaining one civilization in particular. In the early nineteenth century, there were no more Egyptian dynasties, Greek city-states, or Roman emperors; but there were still Jews, practicing the same religion that their ancestors had, millennia earlier. For Hegel, the historical function of Judaism ceased once its values had been universalized by Christianity: “The Temple of Zion is destroyed; the God-serving nation is scattered to the winds.” So what explained the Jewish refusal to fade into history?

The first modern historians of Judaism converged on the idea that it endured because its contribution to human civilization was of eternal relevance. This contribution was characterized by various writers as “the unlimited unity of the all,” “the universal spirit which is within us,” or “the God-idea.” What they shared was a conviction that Judaism was defined by ethical monotheism and Messianic hope. If Jews never stopped preaching these ideas, it was because the world always stood in need of them. In the words of Heinrich Graetz, the greatest of nineteenth-century Jewish historians, “Judaism is not a religion of the present but of the future,” which looks “forward to the ideal future age . . . when the knowledge of God and the reign of justice and contentment shall have united all men in the bonds of brotherhood.”

Such arguments spoke to and for a generation of European Jews who wanted to enter the mainstream of European society, not as supplicants but as the proud bearers of a valuable tradition. If Judaism was less a set of ancient customs and dogmas than a progressive, eternally renewed spirit, then it could take new forms suited to the modern world. It is no coincidence that the era of the “science of Judaism” also saw the birth of the Reform movement, which sought to reimagine Jewish worship. Since Jewishness was defined by an idea rather than by a nationality, for instance, it stood to reason that Jews would no longer need to pray for the restoration of their lost state in the land of Israel. It was unnecessary, a group of Reform rabbis announced in 1845, because “our newly gained status as citizens constitutes a partial fulfillment of our messianic hopes.” They meant as citizens of Germany, where it seemed that Jews could look forward to a future free of ancient prejudices.

As this bleak irony suggests, every generation of historians draws a picture of the Jewish past that is bound up with what they think about the Jewish future. And those visions of the future generally turn out to be wrong, because the past two centuries have seen continual, radical upheavals in Jewish life. After the French Revolution and Napoleon’s conquests brought legal emancipation to Jews in much of Western Europe, for instance, many Jews began to think of their Jewishness as a private matter, an individual religious choice. They were not Jews who happened to live in France, say, the way other Jews in the past had lived in Spain or Persia, but “Frenchmen of the Mosaic faith.” But the persistence of anti-Semitism, as demonstrated in the Dreyfus Affair, convinced a later generation of Jews that this was a vain hope—that Jews were indeed a nation, and had better find a state of their own if they were to survive. This was the conclusion that turned Theodor Herzl, a highly assimilated Viennese journalist who barely observed Jewish customs, into the founder of modern Zionism.

The Russian Revolution, the Holocaust, the creation of the State of Israel, the rise of American Jewry—each of these developments put its own stamp on the meaning of Jewishness, and of the Jewish past. How, then, does that past appear from the vantage point of our own moment? What does being a Jewish historian in the twenty-first century allow one to see, and what does it obscure? These are the questions raised by two major new surveys of the subject: “A History of Judaism” (Princeton), by Martin Goodman, and “The Story of the Jews: Volume Two: Belonging, 1492-1900” (Ecco), the newest installment of a trilogy by Simon Schama.

In certain obvious ways, the two books present very different approaches to the topic. Goodman, as his title declares, is interested in the history of Judaism—that is, of the religious ideas and practices that have defined Jewish life over the millennia. He discusses matters like the order of sacrifices in the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, the doctrinal arguments between different Jewish sects in the Roman Empire, and the varieties of Jewish mysticism, or Kabbalah. Schama, on the other hand, is less interested in Judaism than in Jews—individual human beings who have thrived and suffered. His subjects are by no means the people who did most to shape the Judaism of their time: we meet only a few theologians or rabbis in these pages. Rather, Schama is fascinated by figures like Dan Mendoza, a celebrity boxer in late-eighteenth-century England, and Uriah Levy, a Jewish lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, who purchased Thomas Jefferson’s house, Monticello, in 1834. “The Story of the Jews” is a pageant of microhistories, told in an engaging and dramatic style, which some novelist or playwright ought to plunder for material, the way Shakespeare used Holinshed’s Chronicles.

Despite this difference in focus, however, it is clear that Goodman and Schama, who both grew up Jewish in Britain after the Second World War, share some basic assumptions about what Jewish history teaches. For one thing, unlike their Germanic predecessors, they are empiricists. Neither has any interest in metaphysical principles or historical missions; they do not aim to justify Judaism as a constructive force in world history. These aspects of the Jewish historian’s work have dropped away, partly under the pressure of modern conceptions of scholarly detachment, and partly thanks to a greater confidence in the right of Jews to have their story told.

Instead, Goodman and Schama emphasize the diversity within Judaism. In keeping with the temper of the times—or what that temper seemed to be, until fairly recently—they are in favor of pluralism and against essentialism. This can be seen in the way each chooses to begin the story of the Jews. One might think that the obvious approach would be to begin at the beginning, with Abraham, who, in the Book of Genesis, is called by God to be the father of a great nation. This was the origin of the Jewish people, according to its own age-old self-understanding: Jewish tradition refers to “Abraham our father,” emphasizing the biological kinship between members of the same people.

But, of course, Judaism is not the name of a people; it is the name of a religion, a system of beliefs and practices. Perhaps, then, the story should begin with “Moses our teacher,” the lawgiver who brought God’s commandments down from Mount Sinai. It was Moses who turned being Jewish into a way of life, involving everything from ethical behavior (thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal) to inscrutable rituals and taboos (thou shalt not wear a garment made of mixed linen and wool). It is perhaps this double founding—by Abraham and Moses, as a people and as a faith—that is the key to the Jews’ historical durability.

However, neither Abraham nor Moses is available as a starting point for a modern historian, for the simple reason that neither of them can be proved to have existed. Indeed, for a scholar who subscribes to critical and scientific canons of evidence, it is quite certain that they did not exist, since their stories are full of things that could not possibly have happened: the voices from Heaven, the burning bush, the parting of the Red Sea. Instead, the secular historian must find a starting point that is well attested in non-Biblical evidence, and work forward from there. Already, in this decision, Jewish memory is separated from Jewish history; the latter must study the former, but must not rely on it.

For Schama, in the first volume of his “Story of the Jews,” this means starting in 475 B.C.E., in the Jewish settlement of Elephantine, in Egypt. (Writers of Jewish history conventionally use the initials C.E. and B.C.E., “Common Era” and “before the Common Era,” instead of the explicitly Christian “anno Domini” and “before Christ,” though the numbering of years remains the same.) At that time, we know from recovered papyrus fragments, there was a thriving colony of Jewish soldiers in southern Egypt, serving as border guards for the Persian Empire. Indeed, they built their own temple to worship in. To anyone using the Bible as a guide to the Jewish past, this might seem bizarre and even outrageous. Isn’t Egypt the place the Jews were supposed to have left for good in the exodus? Doesn’t the Bible warn innumerable times that there should be only one temple, in Jerusalem, and that offering sacrifices anywhere else is a sin?

Right off the bat, then, Schama shows that actual Jewish history is considerably more complex than the official story allows. Jews were always diasporic, living outside the land of Israel as well as in it. And Jews were always religiously innovative, contesting the centralized authority of priesthood and orthodoxy. In Schama’s treatment, the Jews of Elephantine sound remarkably like many American Jews today: “worldly, cosmopolitan, vernacular.”

For Schama, Jewishness comprises anything Jews have done, in all the very different places and ways they have lived. The boxer Dan Mendoza was a Jew, and so was Esperanza Malchi, the confidante of a sixteenth-century royal consort in the Ottoman court—just as fully as canonical figures like Moses Maimonides, the medieval Jewish philosopher, or Theodor Herzl. Schama offers an appealingly democratic and humanistic approach to Jewish history. It is also a way of telling the story that focusses on the interactions of Jews with the non-Jewish cultures in which they lived. That is partly because of the nature of the surviving historical sources—Jews who became notable in the wider, Gentile world necessarily had an unusual degree of contact with that world—and partly because Schama is not very interested in religious practice and texts.

“Is Judaism a self-sufficient or an open culture?” he asks. “Were Torah, Bible, Talmud, and the myriad interpretive texts obsessively commenting on them . . . enough unto themselves for leading an authentically Jewish life?” The negative answer is implied in the word “obsessively.” Schama, who, like many modern Western Jews, inhabits a very open Jewish world, finds the allure of an earlier, more closed-off religion hard to understand. When he does characterize Jews at prayer, the result is ambivalent: “It’s only the Christians who bow their heads and shut their mouths in their houses of prayer. Us, we chant, we gabble, we cantillate, we shout.” This is meant affectionately, but it does not seem to enter sympathetically into the spiritual world from which those prayers emerged.

Perhaps for similar reasons, in the second volume of his epic, Schama devotes disproportionate attention to Jews living in Western Europe and the United States, who, in the early modern period, were mostly of Sephardic ancestry, and comparatively little to the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe. (The names of these two major branches of European Jewry come from the Hebrew names of their countries of origin: Ashkenaz was Germany, Sepharad was Spain.) Yet, by the nineteenth century, Eastern Europe was home to a large majority of the world’s Jews, who lived in a comprehensively Jewish society, in a way that the smaller communities of Venice or Amsterdam or Colonial America did not. The Eastern European experience fits less well into Schama’s picture of Jewish history, which emphasizes the ways Jews sought to belong—that is, to belong in Christian society. Of course, Schama uses the subtitle “Belonging” with full knowledge of its ambiguity, since it names a hope that was to be frustrated in most of Europe.

For Goodman, by contrast, the Jewish story has much more to do with shared ideas and beliefs. He is interested in what made Jews Jews, rather than in what made them simply human. But he, too, emphasizes that Jewishness was never a simple or unitary identity, and he, too, mistrusts the Bible as a source of historical evidence. That is why he begins his book not with the Biblical origin stories but with the retelling of those stories by a Jew, Flavius Josephus, who lived in the first century C.E., well into the period of recorded history. Indeed, we know about this period of Jewish history in large part thanks to Josephus, whose colossal work “Jewish Antiquities” undertook to record the entire history of the Jews, for the benefit of a non-Jewish, Greek-speaking audience. (He was, one might say, the Schama or Goodman of the ancient world.)

What Josephus reveals is that the Judaism of his day was diverse, contested, and, in the light of later Jewish tradition, positively strange. In the first century C.E., Goodman explains, there were Pharisees, who held to a strict interpretation of inherited legal traditions, and Sadducees, who grounded their beliefs in the words of the Torah alone. Then there were the Essenes, a remote, ascetic community with strong apocalyptic leanings who shared property in common. Finally, there were the followers of what Josephus terms “the fourth philosophy,” theocratic zealots who believed that the Jews should not be governed by any human ruler, but only by God. This is not to mention the bewildering variety of Messianic prophets and charismatic teachers who populated Judea at the time—including Jesus of Nazareth, whose followers soon left Judaism behind entirely.

The later history of the Jews, Goodman shows, is full of similar divisions. The Talmud, the compilation of Jewish law and commentary that was written in the years 200-500 C.E., bears witness to a distinction between “friends,” who undertook to keep Jewish law strictly, and “people of the land,” who were ignorant of the fine points and couldn’t be trusted to, for instance, tithe their crops properly. In the early Middle Ages, Rabbinite Jews, who honored the Talmud, were challenged by Karaites, who rejected it. And, in the eighteenth century, the new charismatic and pietistic movement known as Hasidism faced fierce opposition from traditionalists, who called themselves mitnagdim, “opponents.”

It is tempting to draw a straight line from these disputatious eras of Jewish history to the modern period, which is the subject of Goodman’s last chapter. Today, there are significant and often acrimonious divisions between Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Jews; between Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews; between secular, assimilated Jews and haredim, the ultra-Orthodox who reject modernity entirely. Some of these groups don’t consider the others to be real Jews at all, just as the Rabbinites felt about the Karaites a thousand years ago. Perhaps we can say, with Ecclesiastes, that there is nothing new under the sun.

However, this would be to underestimate the radical changes that modernity has brought to Judaism, as it has to all religious traditions. Indeed, the very existence of books like Schama’s and Goodman’s can be taken as a sign of the modern difference. According to the late historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, modern Jewish historiography rejects “premises that were basic to all Jewish conceptions of history in the past.” That is the central argument of Yerushalmi’s 1982 book, “Zakhor,” one of the most influential works on Jewish history of the last half century. “Zakhor” is the Hebrew word for “remember,” a command delivered many times in the Bible, and it is possible to see Judaism itself as a technology of memory, a set of practices designed to make the past present. Read the Bible closely and you will find that the holiday of Passover, which commemorates the Jews’ exodus from Egypt, is established by Moses before the exodus actually takes place. It is as though the miracle happens primarily so that it can be remembered.

But memory, Yerushalmi points out, does not require the writing of history. The two may even be opposed. Certainly, from Josephus until the rise of modern scholarship, in the nineteenth century, there was no Jewish historiography to speak of. Instead, Jews connected with their past through parable and ritual, story and symbol, ways of remembering that are generally at odds with the methods and conclusions of modern historians. A good example is the way Jewish tradition understood one of the most traumatic and consequential events in Jewish history: the Jewish War of 66-73 C.E., a revolt against Roman imperial rule that ended with the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and the depopulation of the territory then known as Judea. (A few decades later, the province was renamed Syria Palaestina, after the Jews’ traditional enemies, the Philistines; this is the origin of the name Palestine.)

Today, all historians derive most of what they know about these events from Josephus’ other major work, “The Jewish War.” Josephus was both participant and observer in the events he wrote about: a commander in the rebel Jewish forces, he was taken prisoner and became a courtier of the Roman emperor Vespasian. Thanks to him, we know a great deal about the complex political, military, dynastic, and religious reasons for the Jewish defeat. Yet, in the centuries after the destruction of the Temple, most Jews were not reading Josephus. Tellingly, the original text of his book, written in Aramaic for a Jewish audience, has not survived. Only the Greek translation was preserved, by Christians who saw it as important for understanding Jesus’ world.

For Jews, the story of what happened to the Temple was to be found elsewhere, in the Talmud, which offered its own explanation for the tragedy: it was all because of a misdelivered invitation. As the story goes, a certain man in Jerusalem decided to give a party, and he sent a servant to invite his friend Kamza. Unfortunately, the servant got confused and fetched the similarly named Bar Kamza, who was the host’s enemy. When Bar Kamza showed up, the host refused to let him stay, persisting in his rudeness even when Bar Kamza offered to pay for all the food and drink.

Deeply insulted, not just by the host but by all the rabbis who were present and did nothing, Bar Kamza decided to get revenge. He went to the Roman emperor and lodged an accusation, saying that the Jews were rebelling and would refuse to offer sacrifices in his imperial honor. When the emperor tested the charge by sending a calf to the Temple for sacrifice, Bar Kamza mutilated it in such a way that it would be ritually impure. The rabbis duly refused to allow it to be sacrificed; the emperor was enraged and sent his legions—and so, the Talmud concludes, “our House has been destroyed, our Temple burnt and we ourselves exiled from our land.”

If Josephus’ account had been lost, as so many important ancient texts were lost, the story of Kamza and Bar Kamza would be our primary source for one of the most important events in Jewish history. In other words, we would know basically nothing about it, since the tale is self-evidently not a historical account but a parable. It underlines what the Talmud says elsewhere, that the catastrophe was caused by “baseless hatred” between Jews: the spitefulness of the host and the vengefulness of Bar Kamza resulted in ruin for the whole people. Interestingly, this is essentially the same verdict that Josephus delivers, except that, instead of a personal dispute over a party invitation, he talks about the deadly rivalry between political and religious factions. Perhaps there is a limit to the amount of division a community can tolerate.

The Talmudic story condenses these complex events into a usable moral lesson. That is how the past turns into living memory, even at the price of falsification. Historians like Schama and Goodman are honor-bound to avoid that kind of edifying distortion. “My attempt to present an objective history of Judaism may strike some readers as naive,” Goodman writes, in his introduction. Better to say that it is this very conception of what it means to be objective that marks Schama and Goodman as products of one particular moment in Jewish history. The notion that Judaism is about diversity and pluralism reflects a multicultural, freethinking liberalism that is very congenial to the books’ secular, English-speaking audience.

But that liberalism is under several kinds of pressure in our era of rising nationalism and religious extremism. The lessons of Jewish history might look quite different from the vantage point of Tel Aviv or Hebron. Two hundred years from now—and the record suggests that, if humanity still exists in two hundred years, there will be Jews among them—books like Goodman’s and Schama’s may well seem like products of a world view as remote and mysterious as that of the Sadducees.

Perhaps this constant evolution of the meaning of Jewish history is, in fact, its truest meaning. Hegel wrote, cryptically but influentially, that “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at the falling of dusk.” In other words, full understanding—traditionally symbolized by Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom—is only possible when a historical phenomenon is concluded, when it has become part of the past. But Jewish history, after three thousand years and against all the odds, is still very much a work in progress. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the March 26, 2018, issue, with the headline “Tales of the Tribe.”